Communication networks can be implemented in any of various forms. Ethernet networks, for example, can be realized using meshed or ringed network architectures. Time sensitive communication traffic such as voice and/or video traffic traversing these networks should be given special treatment to reduce jitter. Ensuring that these types of traffic streams experience low jitter can be important to reduce the amount of impairment when such streams are reconstructed at a receiving device.
When a communication network includes wireless communication links, the wireless links can become bottlenecks, and subject time sensitive traffic to higher jitter. While switching/routing nodes in a wired network or a wired portion of a combined wired/wireless network might offer traffic prioritizing/expediting methods to reduce jitter, such a scheme alone is not effective to reduce jitter in wireless links. Time sensitive traffic, especially when traversing wireless communication links, could be subjected to relatively high jitter, which can lead to poor quality reconstructed traffic streams.
Although dedicated traffic channels could be maintained throughout a network to reduce delay and/or jitter, this is not practical in packet networks. Reserving bandwidth through dedicated channels or other mechanisms can lead to bandwidth being wasted when traffic for which bandwidth has been reserved is not present. This type of method is used in synchronous Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) networks.